The British liner Titanic, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912. The berg scraped along her starboard side and opened a series of gashes across her forward compartments, flooding five of them — one more than the ship could survive with. She sank two hours and forty minutes later, at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, breaking apart as she went down.
More than 1,500 of the roughly 2,220 people aboard died, most of them in water just below freezing. Titanic carried lifeboats for only about half the people on board — legal under British rules written for much smaller ships, which had not kept pace with the size of liners — and a number of the boats were lowered only partly filled. The Cunard liner Carpathia, answering the distress calls, rescued 705 survivors.
Two official inquiries were convened within weeks. A United States Senate inquiry, chaired by Senator William Alden Smith, and the British Wreck Commissioner’s inquiry, presided over by Lord Mersey, both examined the ship’s speed through a region where ice had been reported, the ice warnings received and not acted on, the shortage of lifeboats, and the failure of the nearby Californian to come to the rescue.
The inquiries transformed maritime safety. The first International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), in 1914, required lifeboat space for everyone aboard, lifeboat drills and around-the-clock radio watches, and an International Ice Patrol was set up to track icebergs in the North Atlantic shipping lanes. The wreck of the Titanic itself was not found until 1985, lying in two pieces nearly 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) below the surface.
Download the British Wreck Commissioner’s Report (3.6 MB file)
Download the U.S. Senate Inquiry Report (79.2 MB file)